Whitman, Neruda and truths that wait in all things ~ Malinda Words

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 216th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

I believe it was in the early part of 1986 that Professor Ashely Halpe decided to deliver his lecture to first year students at Dumbara Campus in the pleasant surroundings of the British Council, Kandy. He concluded a couple of hours later that pretty places are a distraction. That was the end of that experiment.

He was probably correct. All I remember from that lecture is a reference to the great poet of the United States of America and this planet, Walt Whitman. Prof, as he was fondly referred to, spoke about Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass,’ the fact that Whitman himself had written anonymous reviews of the book for New York papers. He also referred to ‘Song of Myself,’ in which, among other things, he described himself. ‘Without leaving out any body parts,’ he said with his characteristic chuckle.

Prof had to talk about all kinds of poets, Whitman being just one. Whitman resurfaced years later when I became enamoured with the poetry of Pablo Neruda who referred to him many times in his poetry and in speeches.

He titled an address to the New York PEN Club ‘I come to renegotiate my debt to Walt Whitman,’ which the New York Times mis-translated as ‘We live in a Whitmanesque Age.’ Neruda himself would allow his ideological predilections and outcome preferences to ink his own translations of Whitman, but that’s a different story.

During that address, Neruda stated that he was Whitman’s humble servant and described him as ‘a poet who strode the earth with long, slow paces, pausing everywhere to love, to examine, to learn, to teach and to admire.’

Neruda directly details the quantum of the debt owed in ‘Ode to Walt Whitman.’ He claims ‘[he] does not remember at what age nor where: in the great damp South or on the fearsome coast, beneath the brief cry of the seagulls [when he] touched a hand and [discovered] it was the hand of Walt Whitman.’ Thereafter he had ‘trod the ground with bare feet, he had walked on the grass, on the firm dew of Walt Whitman,’ and during his entire youth, he acknowledges, he ‘had the company of that hand, that dew, its firmness of patriarchal pine, its prairie-like expanse, and its mission of circulatory peace.’

There have been many academic papers written on the ways in which Whitman’s poetry inspired Neruda. There are probably quite a few doctoral dissertations too. I am no student of literature but I enjoy poetry enough to want to read them all. This I realised today when I finally got hold of a copy of ‘Leaves of Grass’ from ‘Half Price Books’ in Naperville, Illinois thanks to the generosity of my friend Nandana Perera.

I may have flipped through the book in one of the many libraries I’ve visited over the years, but I cannot remember. Naturally, I went to ‘Song of Myself’ and as naturally tarried awhile at the grass references. I will share just two. The first is at the beginning of the 6th section:

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; 

How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

 I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

  Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, 

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, 

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?  

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.  

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, 

And it means, sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, 

Growing among black folks as among white, 

Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

And, in the 31st section, Whitman states, ‘I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.’

In that one line I feel Whitman has said it all. In that one line I feel Whitman stamped the signature of his belief system. Whitman embraced the universe. He detailed it. He recognized, acknowledged and expressed his intimate relationship with these details. Neruda probably was persuaded to note the sense of enormity as well as constituent parts of the world around him when he read and reread Whitman, but would transliterate space and particles using people, political economy and history with bold, easy and unbelievably apt use of metaphor.

A blade of grass is as nondescript, ‘boring’ and inconsequential as one can imagine. Whitman sees a swirl of life in that modest edge. Neruda, perhaps, mastered metaphor when he read Whitman. And today, almost fifty years after Neruda abdicated all modesty which could as well as be immodesty and 131 years after the ‘deathbed’ edition of Leaves of Grass was published (the slim first edition of 12 poems expanded to almost 400 at the end of Whitman’s life, each a distinct book, according to him), I turn the leaves of partial biographies of two great grandfathers of poetry, remembering a teacher and a friend, Prof Ashley Halpe in awe at not only on connectivity but the collapse of centuries and volumes of life and philosophy into a single line of poetry. Or a blade of grass:

To me the converging objects of the universe partially flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. [Section 20]

And…

All truths wait in all things. [Section 30]

06 September 2023

Whitman, Neruda and truths that wait in all things

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